Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Pride and incertitude

I am a StackOverflow user. I ask questions there and I answer to the questions I find interesting.
In my current company we have a Confluence instance where we post all kind of technical stuff.

Today I have "wronged" a fellow senior developer by posting some comments on an article he has written. The topic was the thread safety of singletons and I have quoted a link. His reaction was incredible: he asked me if I want to play "Who is more senior" with him. I have been supporting this guy in every situation until now because I considered him smart and rational - until now. So, I backed up, I explained my point of view both on wiki and Confluence and how I thought they should work. I told him that I didn't want to measure dicks on Confluence but just to place some pointers... Incredible again - the answer was that I should refrain from posting comments as this would make "junior developers" distrust us.

I believe that in some cultures, whether national and/or corporate people need rigid structure and like having formal positions. Up to a point this is beneficial as it gives both responsibility and authority to people, but, when this degenerates in vanity and lack of openness the things start smelling fishy. Combined with the vanity of being a small boss things go in cascade from bad to worse.

The vanity and the need for recognition are probably the symptoms of some frustrations... I do not know.